Hernon - Britains forgotten wars :bcolonial campaigns of the 19th century

BRITAINS
FORGOTTEN WARS

To my family

COLONIAL CAMPAIGNS
OF THE 19th CENTURY

IAN HERNON

This trilogy was first published as three separate editions by

Sutton Publishing Limited

Massacre and Retribution first published in 1998

The Savage Empire first published in 2000

Blood in the Sand first published in 2001

This edition first published in 2003 by

Sutton Publishing Limited

Reprinted in 2004 (twice), 2005, 2006, 2007

Reprinted in 2008 by

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port,

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2016

All rights reserved

Ian Hernon, 2002

The right of Ian Hernon to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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EPUB ISBN 978 07509 8056 2

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by

Sir Robert Rhodes James

There is a strange mythology that there was a golden age of peace between the ending of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 and the subsequent Congress of Vienna, where, as Duff Cooper eulogised, the participants danced and enjoyed themselves and created a hundred years of peace, and the opening of the Great War in 1914.

A century that included the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the series of conflicts in Southern Africa, culminating in the 18991903 South African War, the Indian Wars in Northern America, the British conquest of Upper Burma, Egypt and the Sudan, almost incessant conflicts on the North-West Frontier of India, the gradual and bloody dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and a succession of Balkan Wars, and the Russo-Japanese war, can hardly be described as notably pacific. Nor were Ceylon or New Zealand brought under the British Crown without bloodshed and hardship.

Ian Hernons selection of some of the forgotten wars of the nineteenth century adds further strength to the destruction of this mythology. What Kipling called the savage wars of peace were often very savage indeed, including the brutal suppression of the Jamaica uprising by the British Governor Eyre, the Maori and Kandy wars, the extraordinary Magdala campaign in Ethiopia, the Riel rebellion in North-West Canada, the 1900 Ashanti campaign, and the terrible Modoc Indian War in the United States.

What is so sobering is that this list could have been much longer. As he states, there was not one month in which British forces were not engaged somewhere across the world, and not only British ones, either. It was a century of almost incessant conflict, culminating in the greatest one of all.

He describes these individually, with insight and shrewdness, and one of his most remarkable achievements is to bring them, and the people concerned, back to vivid life. I had certainly never heard of Shacknasty Jim, nor of many others who play varying roles, some honourable, many tragic, and others loathsome and deplorable. And he never loses sight of the fact that these were people; indeed, one of the great qualities of his accounts of these long-ago and too often bloody conflicts is the pervasive humanity with which he describes the sufferings of those involved, and of the guilty as well as the innocent.

There is in reality no such thing as a small war for those involved. Whether the contestants are numbered in hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands, the same grim rules apply. For some there may be glory, promotion, honours and fame; for the majority the end was an unknown grave far from home. Most died of disease rather than on the battlefield, but the result was the same.

These forgotten sagas have been sadly neglected by professional historians. I hope that Ian Hernon will continue to explore and relate others. There is, unhappily, no shortage of them.

The purpose of this book is not to ape, much less rival, the far more erudite and scholarly volumes already published about the military adventures which helped to create and sustain the British Empire. Rather it is to tell, I hope in the straightforward tone of a reporter, some of the astonishing stories largely forgotten outside academic, specialist and military circles.

Throughout I have used, whenever possible, the words of the participants themselves: semi-literate or beautifully scripted, bewildered or boastful, they are the authentic voices of their age.

The bulk of this book concerns British forces and their opponents. I could not resist, however, including one American colonial conflict. It shares many of the characteristics of the Empire wars, not least the unwillingness of the native defenders to act as expected. More importantly, it is a terrific if tragic story and that has been the main criteria for choosing the sample of forgotten wars included here.

Many people have given me advice, practical help and encouragement, and I thank them all. In particular: the late Sir Robert Rhodes James, without whom the road to publication would have been much rockier; my agent Mike Shaw of Curtis Brown; Jonathan Falconer, commissioning editor at Sutton Publishing; and editor Sarah Fowle.

I must also thank my wife Pauline and my daughters Joanna and Kim, not least for putting up with a lifetime partially spent trampling among piles of old bricks.

For Britain the nineteenth century began, in military terms, with the global upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars and ended with a modern conflict in which machine-guns and a scorched-earth policy were deployed against the Boers. In between there was a supposed peace, marred only by glorious, if tragic, enterprises in the Crimea, Africa and Afghanistan, against the Zulus, the Boers, the Mahdi and Indian mutineers, providing the battles whose names remain proudly emblazoned on regimental banners: Balaclava, Sevastopol, Alma, Lucknow, Kabul, Khartoum, Omdurman. These are the campaigns, it seems, that forged an Empire unparalleled in size before or since, and built the careers of such military leaders as Garnet Wolseley and Lord Kitchener. They were the source of many Boys Own stories and novels, as well as romantic cinema epics full of dramatic cavalry charges with sabres drawn against hordes of painted savages.

The long periods between such dashing conflicts have been dubbed the Pax Britannica, a time when the grip of the Empire was so strong and so benign that the simple presence of a few red tunics was enough to cow the natives. Yet this is misleading. In fact there was not one month in which British forces were not engaged somewhere across the world. Queen Victoria herself said that if Britain was to be truly Great the nation had to be prepared for wars somewhere or other at all times. They were what Rudyard Kipling called the savage wars of peace. Some involved a handful of British officers and native levies, others were major expeditions, the Victorian equivalent of the Falklands campaign of 1982. Most are now forgotten outside regimental museums.